After five years of development, Free Pascal 2.0 is ready. With the new compiler, its authors believe they are ready to become a larger open source development platform. In the MS-DOS world, Pascal was one of the major programming languages and is by means of Borland Delphi an important programming language in the Windows world. In the open source world, Free Pascal is the leading Pascal compiler and while open source is a bit biased using the C language, the Pascal language has a lot to offer to open source programmers.

Another great thing about Delphi is it's execution speed and the fact that it compiles everything into one self-contained binary (exe) file. No need to worry about runtime libraries and associated version compatibilities.

I've always felt that execution speed is a very important element for any compiler. It's also something that's minimized or played down by advocates of languages that are hardly stellar in the speed stakes (e.g. Python or Java for GUI apps).

So, for those of you who've tried Free Pascal, how does it fare in the speed stakes?